On 16 September, three indigenous persons from the Virgen de Dolores community located within the San Sebastián Bachajón ejido were arrested by municipal police of Chilón, being adherents to the EZLN’s Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle. Those arrested denounced having suffered torture and cruel and inhumane treatment toward the end of having them confess under compulsion to the crimes with which they had been charged.

The indigenous persons of Bachajón indicated that the operation was a revenge attack, given that one of the police who arrested the three Tseltales is a close friend of Sebastián Méndez Hernández, who is imprisoned in the El Amate jail for having participated in the murder of the indigenous man Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano on 21 March 2014. On this occasion, the residents of Virgen de Dolores captured the murderous police officer and handed him over to the authorities, such that they claim that this fabrication of crimes (torture and kidnapping) is in reality vengeance from the municipal police. Beyond this, one of the arrested is a brother to Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano.

In the end, a judge from Ocosingo assigned a bail of 300,000 pesos to each of the detainees. This is an amount that is impossible to cover, given the economic situation of those arrested.

In a communique published on 17 April, ejidatarios from San Sebastián Bachajón, Chilón municipality, announced the realization of international days “for justice for San Sebastián Bachajón and our fallen comrades Juan Vázquez Guzmán and Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano.” These days of action are to take place between 24 April and 8 May 2014.

It should be recalled that on 24 April one year will have passed since the murder of Juan Vázquez Guzmán: “Still justice has not been done. There has not been an effective investigation of his killing, and his murderers and those who ordered his execution continue to enjoy impunity. Meanwhile, efforts to loot the people of Juan continue,” the communique observed.

The ejidatarios denounce that “The three levels of government, with their army, police, allies in transnational companies, locally financed paramilitary groups, and their party militants do not cease their attacks and lootings by means of lies and tricks, death-threats, violence, imprisonment, torture, and even murder, all of which they employ to succeed in realizing their ambition of taking control of the ancestral lands of the ejido for the construction of a luxury tourist complex beside the beautiful waterfalls of Agua Azul.”

The document also stresses that “Now there has been another murder, another vile attempt to force our comrades to renounce their just and dignified struggle and resistance. Juan Carlos Gómez Silvano, who was only 22 years of age, was riddled with more than twenty shots on 21 March 2014. Juan Carlos participated in the construction of autonomy in the recovered land of Virgen de Dolores. He was a regional coordinator of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle from the San Sebastián Bachajón ejido. No one has been arrested or accused of this crime. We respond with pain, but also with rage.”

The communique ends by calling “on all those persons of good heart and all the children of the Earth to steel themselves day by day in constructing another world, a better one, full of liberty, justice, respect, and dignity, allowing for everyone to live in accord with their own customs, modes, times, and geographies.”

On 21 March, Carlos Gómez Silvano, a Tsotsil indigenous man of 22 years of age and an adherent to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, was ambushed and murdered on a dirt road in the Chilón municipality. His body showed 23 gunshot wounds from firearms of different calibers. Gómez Silvano formed part of the adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle who maintain possession of the land known as Virgen de Dolores. The Public Ministry was prevented from confirming the acts and taking the body of the deceased, given that his comrades decided to take him to the place of his origin for burial.

“Shortly after a year since the murder of Juan Vázquez Guzmán, the bad government sends its hitmen to harm our Virgen de Dolores community which has been born with much effort and sacrifice,” noted a communique from the San Sebastián Bachajón ejido. It should be stressed that several murders have been observed in the Chilón municipality that to date have not been clarified.